The News for The Young Businessmen

Interview with Alexis Piperides, Co-founder and CEO of PROTOIO Inc.

Alexis is co-founder and CEO of Proto.io, the leading mobile app prototyping platform. Alexis is a UX design enthusiast and an advocate of new faster product lifecycles through prototyping and other innovative processes.

1) What is Proto?

Proto.io helps designers, entrepreneurs, and product managers enhance their design process by creating realistic, interactive and sharable prototypes, without code, that can be viewed on the actual mobile device.

2)How did you come up with the idea for Proto?

Back in 2011, before we started Proto.io, we were running a web and mobile design agency. We were looking for a solution for our design team to be able to create a visual prototype to validate their ideas and share their work with customers and developers, without coding. We couldn’t find anything available in the market; the existing wireframe/mockup tools wouldn’t support any touch events or advanced animations. We ended up building Proto.io for our team and after seeing how useful it would be for the entire industry, we rolled it out as a product.

3) What makes it different to all the other prototype applications?

Proto.io is built for mobile first. It is a platform that can be used by anyone involved in the design process without requiring any special design skills or coding. Unlike most of other prototype tools, it comes with UI libraries that enable easy and fast prototyping that can span from early idea validation, all the way to fully interactive high fidelity prototypes. It allows layer-based prototyping and gives full functionality to build virtually anything that takes place on a mobile device, website, or desktop application from the simplest to most advanced interactions and animations, using its built-in animation timelines feature.

4) Where will the apps go in the future?

Mobile apps change rapidly as mobile devices change. In the future, we expect to see huge advances in mobile devices and as always apps will have to adopt and support the new hardware and operating systems. It’s possible that we will come across new interactions beyond touch, like motion sensing, eye tracking and other. In some cases, we will see the emergence of VR apps with even more interaction points.

5)What inspired you to go into business?

A combination of the need of tools and things that didn’t exist and the aspiration to provide people with new productivity tools that will help them work better and faster.

6) What advice would you give to aspiring entrepreneurs who want to start a mobile app?

Entrepreneurs wanting to build a mobile app should be cautious not to get over excited easily. They need to do thorough research on their app/business and try to validate their idea as early as possible without spending a lot of money and resources. The best way to do this is with early stage prototyping.
We would like to thank Alexis for speaking with us.

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Jake Slagel is the owner and founder of The Young Businessmen. Since its creation one year ago it has been funded and operated solely by him. Jake is currently running the website along with being a student.
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